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| Note the red one in the background. Each anchor is a runner around a tree with a carabiner connecting to 9mm. Nine mil will stretch a lot and saw on rock edges. The runners and carabiners introduce unnecessary points of failure. Each anchor had enough unused rope to tie around the tree. |
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| A wire gate carabiner, gate facing down toward the rock that can force it open. This is what happens when your friend, who does all the rigging, doesn't make it today. |
After reading your blog I'm surprised there aren't more climbing accidents. Incredible incompetence
ReplyDeleteThere have been few serious accidents and virtually no anchor failures. This must be a tribute to over engineering on the part of equipment manufacturers, but frankly, we are living on borrowed time. The main problem is the decline of the climbing community that had a culture of exchanging best practices. Gyms are now the center of climbing culture and they create a sense of entitlement, the total opposite of community. They are some of the leading "instructors", but the dominant provider is REI. Both offer an "experience" their customers expect without actually preparing them to climb on their own. They foster dependence, not independence.
DeleteI completely agree that gyms are promoting poor safety, ethics, and behavior, but I'm going to disagree about REI, at least based on my experiences when I was a new climber.
ReplyDeleteI took their basic climbing class not because I needed climbing instruction, as I'd been soloing Class 5 rock in the mountains for years, but because it provided a setting for re-learning tie-in knots and belaying without risking killing someone. The guides were all about safety.
A year later, I took heir class on anchors. The guides were strictly old-school: long, fat static line tied around two points and backed up; tethering as necessary while setting the anchor; and making everything but the climbing rope and the belay loop/device redundant.
Maybe REI has changed since then, but the classes I took were invaluable, as were the trad classes I took at Seneca a few years later.
More than once, I have seen "guides" of gym groups doing and saying some really sketchy things at Carderock and Great Falls, but the REI guides I met during my classes were safe and competent.
Sadly, REI has had an almost 100% loss of the instructors that you probably had. They were local climbers, very experienced, members of the climbing community. REI instructors now are people you have never seen, don't know the climbs, and aren't part of the community. I recognize only one face from last year among the instructors. They have expanded to be the largest provider of instruction taking up a lot of real estate on weekends.
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